Day 2/8: Boris Is Inspired By the Greeks To Fix The Dreidels

See previously

Day 1/8: Boris The Terrible Infiltrates Ohr Somayach And Learns About Hanukkah

Day 2/8: Boris Is Inspired By the Greeks And Fixes The Dreidels

Boris wasn't much interested in the story of the oil. He was more interested in the Greeks. They seemed to have troubled the Jews quite a bit, an accomplishment Boris1 admired.

Boris was delighted to learn that the Greeks had forbidden¹ the Jews from learning Torah. Oh, how Boris wished he could do something like that! But how could he convince the Jews not to learn Torah, especially on Hanukkah?

At Ohr Somayach, Boris had been told about how, even under perilous conditions in the past, Jews continued learning Torah. A Jewish person without Torah is compared a fish without water. So when Torah learning was prohibited by law, many retreated to caves in order to practice their traditions secretly.

The government authorities would send inspectors to find out what they were doing in the caves. But whenever these inspectors arrived, they would cunningly hide their sacred texts and pretend to be engaged in a gambling sort of game known as 'dreidel'. If they were playing dreidel, they couldn't be learning Torah, could they?

This gave him an idea.

Boris would rather the Jews play dreidel² than learn Torah! He would happily provide the dreidels for this cause, for free. So Boris ordered dreidels from the land of Israel, hoping this would provide a distraction and maybe encourage some gambling. Eager to inspect the new gambling toys, he unwrapped one Dreidel. It had strange markings on all four sides. It looked like Hebrew.

נ ג ה פ

What could that possibly mean? Was it a secret code, or perhaps a Kabbalistic incantation? He'd better find out before he gave one away to every Jew in Chelm.

Curious, Boris approached the Rabbi of Chelm to inquire about the inscriptions on it. The Rabbi explained, "It reads, 'A great miracle happened here,' in Hebrew: 'Nes gadol haya po.'"

Boris, perplexed, asked, "Here? There are no miracles here! Not in my store! What's the Hebrew word for 'there'?"

Rabbi replied, "That would be 'Nes gadol haya sham,' meaning 'A great miracle happened there.' You would need a ש instead of a פ."

Determined to thwart any miracles in his store, Boris meticulously altered "פ-here" to "ש-there" on every dreidel, rendering them to declare, "A great miracle happened over there!" Boris was surprised when no one complained.

For you:

Can you guess why no one complained about the Dreidels?

Image: dreidels with inscriptions changed from ‘here’ (suitable for the land of Israel, where the miracle happened) to ‘there’ (suitable for Chelm, where the miracle did not happen.)

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1. Greeks vs. Torah: https://ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/1327

If man is created in the image of G-d, then life has essential value. If man was not created in the image of G-d, however, man must reduce the gnawing emptiness, the absence of Right and Wrong, by instead turning life into a game, a showdown where "fair chance" resembles truth. Some people play checkers, others chess. Some people play poker, others bridge. The more involved the game the deeper man can engage his intellect - but only to focus less upon life's meaningless because life in the godless Greek mind is essentially a game. We simulate a kind of dignity by honoring the rules of the game.

All the world is reduced to aesthetics and a game in this Greek world view. But the Jew says no, that when G-d encountered man through the medium of prophecy, man was charged with the mission to fulfill a universal role, the performance of which is judged at the individual, communal, and national level.

Ohr Somayach Institutions www.ohr.edu

2. https://ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/1309

A deeper and inspiring discussion about playing dreidel.

Ohr Somayach Institutions www.ohr.edu